THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 698, November 25, 2012Our single nebulous hope resides in a leaderless,centerless spirit of individual liberty. Each timeit's provoked into raising its head, it startlesand frightens those who think they own us."w3

At the moment in England, our masters and their clients are
discussing censorship of the newspaper press. After months of
submissions, a
government
inquiry into newspaper conduct has finished, and its report
will almost certainly call for what is called "a rule-based
framework of regulation." The surface argument is between those
who want controls backed by the law, and those who want "voluntary
self-regulation." No one who matters, though, disputes that
something must be done.

This means that something will be done. And this something will
be formal censorship. Even if we start out with one of the minimal
options, the desired end is plain. This is for newspapers to be
brought under the same formal control as the broadcast media. They
will be licensed. They will be subject to various forms of prior
restraint. There will be review and complaints procedures for
articles already published. The whole process will be managed by
the usual ruling class apparatchiks, all on vast salaries, and all
enforcing conformity to the usual totalitarian PC.

Now, I know that my duty as a libertarian is to start jumping up
and down in defence of our free press. And I will go through the
motions. We already have too many controls in this country on what
can be published. These are generally used to keep wrongdoing by the
rich and powerful from the public eyethat, or to keep us from
knowing the truth about the caring, sharing, multi-cultural paradise
that is modern England. The effect of more control will be to block
future exposure of fraud and bribe-taking by Members of Parliament.
Ohand there is the matter of those ruling class salaries and
pensions. I don't know about you, but the great army in modern
England of looters in suitswith their low-grade intellects and
first-class connections, and their £400,000 salaries at my
expense, and their endless public moralising about how everyone
else should be made to livethey really get on my tits.
Anything that means more for these, or more of these, gets my
thumb straight in the down position.

This being said, how much difference will actual censorship make
to the quality of investigation and news reporting in the newspapers?
In a sense, the question answers itself. If it were likely to make
no difference, why bother discussing it? If true, however, this
answer is of limited value. I admit that, in the past few years, the
newspapers have brought down scumbag after scumbag. The most recent
example is
Denis Macshane,
a Labour MP and former Minister who was shown to have milked his
expenses by about as much as many of his electors earn in a lifetime
of toil. Then there was
David Laws,
forced to resign as a Minister when it came out that he was getting
the taxpayers to underwrite his relationship with his boyfriendI
notice, by the way, he's a Minister again. Or there was
Liam Fox, also
forced out of office when we learned about the very fishy dealings
of his close friend.

Never mind whether The Sun newspaper hacked the mobile
telephones of various entertainment celebritiesit strikes me as
obvious that the purpose of "regulation" will be to stop future
embarrassments like the cases given above.

And that's about the limit of the value we get from the newspapers.
I suppose they're worth defending for that limited value. But it's
hardly worth rolling out long quotes from John Milton and John Stuart
Mill. The cases given above are exceptions to the general rule, which
is for the newspapers to collaborate in hidingor simply never to
noticewrongdoing in high places. Look at these cases:

1. In 2007, the BBC
announced
that, following a meeting with 28 "top environmental scientists" the
year before, it would no longer pretend to give balanced coverage of
the debate on man-made climate change. Instead, it would become a
naked propagandist for the global warming scam. No salaried newspaper
reporter bothered to ask who these 28 experts were, and what were
their scientific credentials. It took five years before an
independent blogger, Tony Newbery, got round to putting in a Freedom
of Information request for the names of these experts. When the BBC
sent a team of lawyers into action to get a biased tribunal to slap
this request down, it was another blogger,
Maurizio
Morabito (omnologos), who dug round the Web until he found the
full list, and showed that these 28 experts were mostly the usual
riders on the global warming bandwagon. It became plain that the BBC,
which is "public service broadcaster" with a legal duty of impartiality,
was up to its neck in a gigantic intellectual fraud.

After the event,
Melanie Phillips
wrote a nice article about all this in The Daily Mail. It
would have been a nicer article, of course, if she and her friends
had lifted so much as a finger of their own to expose the fraud.

2. Cyril Smith
was a Liberal Party politician, and supposedly the fattest Member of
Parliament in history. He was also a pederast with a taste for beating
young boys. In 1991, I had dinner with a retired Special Branch officer.
He told me how, in 1977, the Rochdale police had assembled a dossier of
evidence against the MPsystematic abuse of homeless boys in a hostel
he'd helped found. However, the man was Chief Liberal Whip at the time,
and the Liberals were in an informal coalition with a minority Labour
Government. My friend was given the job of driving up to Rochdale to
confiscate the dossier, and tell the local police to mind their own
business in future.

I thought this was very amusing, but only half believed it. The
Internet was still in the future, and, however crass their actions,
I still took it for granted that England was ruled by men of
reasonably spotless integrity. Well, Cyril Smith died in 2010, and
it came out that he really had been beating andso far as his
shape allowedbuggering every boy who fell into his clutches.

Not a peep, while he lived, in the mainstream media, of course.
So much for the Fourth Estate of the Realm!

3. I suppose I should mention the
Jimmy Savile
scandal. But this has been done to death, and you need to be very
American indeed not to have heard something about it. Again, though,
it was pretty common knowledge that he was partial to underage girls.
I heard about it when I was a schoolboy. He always looked like a
dirty old man. Despite this, when he died in 2011, the newspaper
press went into a chorus of his praises. It took a whole year for
him to be demoted to his currentthough temporarystatus of
most prolific sex offender in history.

More important, though, than the details of what Jimmy Savile
might or might not have done in a caravan in Skegness c.1973 is what
the sudden eruption of the scandal wiped from all the newspapers.
Fringe organisations like the British National Party had long been
pointing to a culture of sexual predation among Pakistani Moslems
in the North of England. There were whole gangs of these people
involved in the kidnap and rape of white working class girls. The
police had ignored every complaint. Ditto local authorities. Anyone
who complained too loudly was called a racist and threatened with
formal or informal punishments. Finally, the scale of criminality
reached a point where the authorities were forced to act. A series
of trials in the first half of 2012 provided chapter and verse
evidence about the real nature of race relations in England. This
had to be reported
by the newspapers and commented on by its appointed writers.
They even had to report police claims that one murdered white
girl had been disposed of in a mincing machine and sold as doner
kebabs.

Very convenient, don't you think, that the stuttering discussion
of race and immigration all this forced the authorities into allowing
was immediately smothered by full spectrum coverage of the alleged
crimes of the late Jimmy Savile?

I could go on. I believe that the transfer of Hong Kong was set
in motion, back in 1982, by a few London banks that wanted privileged
access to the China market. I could give you the names of the Cabinet
Ministers who were bribed into beginning a transfer that no one in
Peking had asked for. But they are still alive and very rich, so I
won't. I believe that William Hague was either bribed or blackmailed
by the Americans into losing the 2001 general election to LabourTony
Blair having been regarded as more reliably pro-American. I believe
many other things. Just because I have no evidence for them doesn't make
them untrue. Just because some of them sound outlandish doesn't make me
mad. Bearing in mind what we know the newspapers haven't reported, or
have conspired to cover up, all of the above and much more beside is
conceivably true.

And I'm not the only man in England to have noticed the utter
worthlessness of the newspapers. Look at these sales figures:

Yes, censorship is always bad, and that's what the ruling class
is talking about. But why go through more than the motions in defence
of a newspaper press as worthless and generally corrupt as the one we
have? And, of course, censored or otherwise, there soon won't be much
of a newspaper press in England to defend or attack.